Helaina's Blog

Man vs. Machine

One of the most visible differences between the developing and developed worlds is the abundance of labor and labor-intensive processes in the developing world. Nearly every day in Rwanda I observe someone doing a job that was mechanized or automated at least one or two decades ago in most parts of the developed world. The abundance of cheap labor and the unreliability of electricity here combine to create employment in tasks that are menial and sometimes downright comical. I suppose the bottom line is that when you can’t rely on machines, you rely on people. Here are some examples:

– All buses around Kigali are staffed by a driver and a conductor who collects the bus fares from passengers. The conductor also functions as the bus route display screen by shouting the bus destination at every stop.

– Every morning Kigali’s streets are full of women employed by the city to sweep the sidewalks and the streets.

– Instead of parking meters, the system of paying for parking is much more entertaining: once you have finished your business and you turn your car on, someone in a yellow vest will chase after you flourishing a ticket whose price correlates to how long you were parked. Some people believe it’s optional to stop backing up and pay.

– Cell phone airtime is prepaid here and not on a monthly plan. To reload airtime, you physically purchase a scratch card from one of the brightly-vested airtime sellers found at nearly every corner of the city. If you request, the sellers will even scratch off the gray covering to reveal the code for you.

– I believe I have seen a lawnmower once or twice, but I still want to share this example because I’m sure it wasn’t the only time this happens: I once watched a man cutting a sizable plot of grass with a pair of office scissors.

– Instead of alarm systems (or sometimes in addition to), nearly every big office and well-to-do home employs a security guard to keep watch (read: sleep) at night. Guards for homes are rarely armed, while guards for offices are from official security companies and have a night stick or gun with them.

– And now for a hybrid situation: At the airport there is an automated ticket machine where you press a button at the entrance to take a ticket. Since the machine is too far from most cars, there is often a person there to press the button for the driver and hand over the ticket. I find this hysterical for some reason.

Now I must say that at times I appreciate and enjoy the benefits provided by the human over the machine. Instead of fumbling with a MetroCard on the bus and getting flustered if I don’t have enough credit, here I can wait for the conductor to ask me to pay and sometimes I even negotiate a cheaper fare if I’m going only a few stops. Then again, if I’m transferring to another bus line I don’t get the discount that my MetroCard would accord me.

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5 Responses

Your blog raises the question: What if there are not enough jobs? This can happen even in a developed country. Instead of street sweepers we have scam artists, bank robbers, telemarketers, and the homeless.

In both Haiti and Rwanda I was also very interested in the amount of hard physical work being done by hand. Have a massive three foot diameter tree stump to remove? Employ 15 guys for three days to hand dig and chop the stump out. A bulldozer in the states would take care of that in 15 minutes with one person.

I think education is the key to moving from menial labor into a middle class society. People need education to start working on things like modern plumbing, modern building standards, quality construction, etc, rather than continuing to spend time on things that are automated or done by machines in richer societies. It’s a gradual change over time, but if you continue to employ so many at menial tasks, there won’t be any incentive for finding more profitable things to do. At some point it’s best to free up that money and labor for other tasks, which is always very hard to do. It’s easy to offer employment, but very hard to remove it, even when it’s the right thing to do. And I do not want to be the one in charge of deciding when it’s the right thing to do.

With too many un-employed youth around,automation would be immoral. I run a company that makes some construction stuff,it would be cheaper to bring in the machines and achieve even faster rewards,but that would mean dozens of un-employed Rwandans going back to till the land. Not a wise option then.

Automation is supposed to provide a faster service in terms of time, safer in terms of security like “Bank Machines or ATMs”, precise and long term in terms of running on energy that is harmless to the environment in comparison to a human being physical strength.

As a Rwandan, I think automation will always tend to overtake human labor but I believe that used in a smart way, efficiently, it can contribute to creating more safer and reliable jobs!

For example, jobs that put all these people in charge of Automation, its control and management!

The only problem is to balance these two:
– Creating Automation
– Creating jobs from Automation

I agree that it is a matter of more/less developed countries to give such visible difference between amount of automatized jobs. But it is not only a matter of technology availability, but also places of work. More developed countries have a lot more service jobs, more offices, and what is the most important: more money to spend by regular workers. So, the whole entertainment business gives a lot of job, also luxury products selling, books, movies, music, IT etc. But you have a point – you can observe a lot of different jobs than in more developed countries, that is a fact. It is good that you write about it to show people that there are a lot of different places with different people, culture and possibilities. I think that your blog should be more popular (your PR is quite low). I also think that you can achieve that with adding more basic and simple information. I thought that you could be interested in adding more info about culture of Rwanda. It could attract more people to come and see Rwanda in flesh and also make your website more popular in Google search results. Maybe you could be interested in adding a link to http://www.everyculture.com/No-Sa/Rwanda.html ?. Please let me know what do you think about that.
Katekate.frenson@advameg.com

About Me

I graduated from Tufts University, where I was an International Relations major and an Empower Fellow of the Institute for Global Leadership. I moved to Rwanda in 2010 as a Princeton-in-Africa Fellow to work with General Rwanda. Afterwards, I worked with Eos Visions, a social enterprise that facilitates educational travel and capacity building. I left Rwanda in 2012 to join the U.S. Foreign Service (diplomatic corps) as a political officer. While I no longer blog on this site, I've left it up as a reference for people looking for information on Rwanda. I monitor the comments sporadically and try to respond, but I apologize for not being able to reply to all in a timely manner. Thank you for your interest in my website and in Rwanda!